Top-ranking Americans have told equally top-ranking Indians in
recent weeks that the US has plans to invade Iran before
Bush's term ends. In 2002, a year before the US invaded Iraq,
high-ranking Americans had similarly shared their definitive
vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, making it clear that they would
change the regime in Baghdad.
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050926/asp/nation/story_5284580.asp
The Telegraph, Calcutta India
Gulf factor key to PM's Iran vote decision
K.P. NAYAR
Washington, Sept. 25: New Delhi acquitted itself reasonably
well in the first significant challenge to its global standing
and diplomacy since the world acknowledged India as an
emerging global power worthy of being in the big league in the
21st century.
The handling of the challenge -- its vote on whether Iran's
nuclear programme should be referred to the UN Security
Council -- was all the more commendable because its outcome
defied domestic political expediency.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally cleared the decision
to vote with the US and the so-called EU-3, namely Germany,
France and the UK, in favour of referring Iran at an
unspecified date to the Security Council on suspicions of
pursuing a programme to acquire nuclear weapons in the full
knowledge that the vote would spark a furore among Left
parties and to a lesser extent in the BJP.
In deciding to vote with the West and not abstaining along
with Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa, what weighed with
the Prime Minister was the absolute imperative for India to
secure its interests in the Gulf and not the desire to protect
the July 18, 2005, Indo-US nuclear agreement, according to
diplomats engaged in the negotiations that led to the IAEA
resolution yesterday.
Top-ranking Americans have told equally top-ranking Indians in
recent weeks that the US has plans to invade Iran before
Bush's term ends. In 2002, a year before the US invaded Iraq,
high-ranking Americans had similarly shared their definitive
vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, making it clear that they would
change the regime in Baghdad.
On the last day of his stay in New York this month, Singh made
public his fears for the safety of nearly four million
Indians in the Gulf in the event of diplomacy failing to
persuade Iran away from a confrontation with the US and others
on the nuclear issue.
Singh knows that whatever he has done on the economic front in
the last year and a half as Prime Minister and much of what he
did as finance minister in the 1990s will be under threat if
the Gulf was plunged into another war.
In talks with leaders in the US, Russia and Europe, Singh has
linked India's energy security and its comfortable balance of
payments to stability in the Gulf. That squarely put India
against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons in violation of its own
international commitment under the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty (NPT).
In his conversation with Singh on Friday, Iran's President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made it clear that Iran would no longer
be bound by the IAEA's "additional protocol" allowing its
inspectors into the country if it was referred to the Security
Council.
Such an action would have been only a few steps away from an
Iranian withdrawal from the NPT itself, which would have
created a grave international crisis. Through other channels,
the Iranians also told India that they would start uranium
enrichment from a second nuclear facility if the Security
Council was brought into the issue.
In the light of these developments, foreign secretary Shyam
Saran in New York and India's permanent representative to the
UN in Vienna, Sheel Kant Sharma, engaged in marathon talks
with the Americans and Europeans right upto the actual vote
last night to ensure that Iran was dealt with in the IAEA and
not hauled before the Security Council immediately.
South Block's recommendation that India should vote for the
resolution was put before the Prime Minister after the EU-3
approached India in New York on Friday night.
French, German and British officials assured Saran then that
India's insistence on dealing with Iran in the IAEA -- at least
till the next meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors in
November -- had been accommodated. The EU-3 also assured India
that IAEA director-general Mohamed El Baradei would continue
to have the whiphand on the issue.
Iran is understood to have assured India privately after last
night's vote that it would resume negotiations with the IAEA.
But in Tehran's world of doublespeak, it is also expected to
whip up popular sentiment by publicly railing against the IAEA
resolution.
--
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"Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World"
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